A Hard Day's Night: As Close to Being a Beatle as You'll Get

Today's release of the Beatles: Rock Band video game further confirms what's been known for years already: the Fab Four will live forever. Only the form will change. LPs became cassettes, cassettes became CDs, CDs gave way to MP3s, and now those all those static digital files have become interactive (and, thank heavens, re-mastered). In a decade or so we'll probably be donning virtual-reality goggles and staring out through Ringo's eyes at the insanity of that first Ed Sullivan show.

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But no FX wizardry will ever capture what it was like to be a Beatle better than a scrappy, goofy, low-budget black-and-white film did in 1964:

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Time to rearrange the Netflix queue (twice): A Hard Day's Night is spoof that feels like documentary, advertising that feels like inside joke, rock-and-roll fiction that feels exactly like the reality of being a rock star. (And I do mean rock-and-roll. In 1964, the boys were fewer than two years beyond their first, punishing gigs in the rough and raw city of Hamburg, and they'd learned to kick more than a little ass onstage.)

But the Beatles were also still just four scrappers from Liverpool, a tight crew who'd earned every step they'd taken to stardom, and suddenly found themselves on the cusp of unimaginable superstardom. It was scary. It was nuts. It was four years (or forty-eight, depending on how you count) before Yellow Submarine. But it looks like fun.